Here is a good email marketing example from Ace Hardware

Why does this work? It’s seasonal and it’s good, informative content that shows you why you need their products. They didn’t just send a promo for me to by grass seed and fertilizer – they are telling me why I need it through informative content.

No related posts.

We originally posted a version of this on our tech blog in May, but decided to share it with you again…

In Des Moines, IA it is tough to find good seafood and when you find a place that has it – you keep going back. Our place of choice is Waterfront, but as you can imagine, fresh seafood in Iowa costs a little more than it does on the coasts. So last week, we decided to try to make our favorite Waterfront cuisine ourselves at home.

To our surprise, Waterfront offers up their recipes on their website – in printable 4×6 recipe cards. They also have a market attached to the restaurant that sells fresh seafood daily.

Many businesses consider their recipes top secret – whether it be business processes, industry knowledge, or expertise. So why does a business like Waterfront embrace it? Why do they give out their recipes and all the means to make it yourself when their core business is to prepare and serve you food?

This act of giving away information is core to the Freemium business model. It is fundamental to the content strategies Doug and I discuss on our internet business podcast and is something I teach my clients when we discuss organic SEO. It’s the reason I blog, record a podcast, tweet industry details, etc. I give away my successful internet business recipes daily – but for what? Why give away something when I can have people to pay me for that knowledge?

Lets return to Waterfront… They give you a recipe and the ingredients – and send you on your way to make that delicious Halibut Royale that you’ve eaten in the restaraunt a number of times. Excitedly you arrive home and start cooking. As you work your way through the recipe you find it’s not as easy as you had thought. And when you finally pull it out of the oven and take the first bite – you realize it’s not near as good as it is in the restaraunt. So next time you get the craving for fresh seafood you will likely return to the restartaunt and purchase the expert-made halibut royale rather than attempting to prepare it yourself.

So I give away all my web strategy recipes. Some people will take them and run – never requiring my consulting services. But many will take the recipes and try to make them work themselves only to realize they aren’t cut out for it. Upon this realization who do you think they will return to? … the chef that gave them the recipe.

This principle forms a significant cornerstone in how we are changing our business in 2010. Do you give away your recipes? Let us know in the comments or jump into the forums.

No related posts.

Yesterday I read a tweet from Dan Shipton about a book I’ve heard a lot about – The Paradox Of Choice – so I decided to jump over to Amazon and pick it up. Upon checking out I noticed the beauty that is Amazon’s checkout page design. I thought it was ironic that I was purchasing a book about choice when I came to the realization that Amazon had designed an extremely effective checkout page – that simply reduced the amount of choices.

Here is Amazon’s Checkout Page Design…

Click To Enlarge

Let’s walk through this e-commerce checkout page design. The beauty of this design relates back to the book I was ordering in the first place – Choice. The book explains the psychology of choice – which basically assumes that as more options are provided to a person the less likely they will make a decision. In the case of this Amazon checkout page they have reduced the amount of choices to two: checkout or get out – and they’ve hidden the get out button.

1. Call To Action - Right away Amazon tells you to click the button on the right to place the order

2. Action – Right next to the call to action is the action button – the “Place Your Order” button located in the prime spot in the top right. I guarantee they split tested this numerous times to find the right sweet spot.

3. Get Out – The “get out” button as I like to call it is the only way for a user to get out of this screen and it’s hidden right in the middle – out of sight, out of mind. This is a great tactic to keep people on this screen.

By reducing the amount of choice on their checkout screen Amazon can funnel you into the decision they want you to make, which of course is to finish your transaction.

If you are doing e-commerce or lead generation this is something you need to be aware of on your landing pages, product pages, and checkout pages. By reducing the number of options a user has the odds increase that they will take your preferred path through your goal funnel. If you are having high bounce rates at specific points in your funnel – like the final checkout page – look into the number of options on the page.

Chances are – if you simplify your landing or checkout pages your conversion rates will go up.

Do you have any questions about landing page or e-commerce design? Let us know in the comments or jump into the forums!

No related posts.

No related posts.

In this screencast we show you how to create a real-time social media press release using our content, FriendFeed, and WordPress. You can see the final product here.

This real-time information shows what our company is doing right now – from what we are working on to what we are talking about – giving our community a quick snapshot into who we are and what we do.

Show Links

• FriendFeed
• WordPress
• Social Media Press Release Template (pdf)
• 48Web Social
• FriendFeed Group
• Web Strategy Workshop FriendFeed Group

No related posts.

Over the couple years I have gotten really good at writing for SEO. What’s this mean? It means that when I write a blog post I always have SEO on the back of my mind. How will this post become findable? What are the best keywords to use? What’s a good headline to bring in people from our content outposts? Here are 3 tips that helped me get started writing for SEO.

1. Think About Search

This is the most valuable tip but yet the most basic. When writing a new post, think about what you would search for to find the post you are writing. Condense that to 4 or five words if possible and use that as your post title.

2. Use Keywords

Not only should you sprinkle the keywords you are targeting within your post, use them in your meta data too! Use your keywords in tags, and most importantly for your meta data using an SEO plugin or something similar.  Some SEO’s will say to use a different Page Title than your on page header. In this case you can override the page title using your SEO plugin. This is done because you can target two keyword phrases for two of the highest ranking on page SEO factors.

You should take advantage of a killer plugin from our friends at WordTracker to help you figure out the best keywords to target while your writing your post. This is a firefox extension that you can pop open while you are blogging to help you figure out the best keywords to target. Download it here.

3. Don’t Forget Descriptions

In the world of content outposts descriptions become even more important. Often times the excerpt or meta description travel farther than just your site but to your content outposts as well. The excerpt and meta description travel in your RSS feed and are used by content outposts and aggregators as descriptive text along with the link back to the original blog post. This is important for two reasons.

First, it helps your content outposts to rank in search results. This is important because it creates a scenario where you can rank multiple items on the first page of results for your targeted keyword. Secondly your descriptions help people that are active in your content outposts determine whether or not they will click through to read the full posts. This is also very important.

What tips do you have? Let us know in the comments or jump over to the forum!

No related posts.

So we use bit.ly and su.pr for URL shortening here and at GANB – and both are excellent. Today we wanted to show why we use su.pr on certain posts.

First off – it allows you to post to both Twitter and Facebook.

We’re all about ease of publishing to content outposts here…

Secondly there are some great stats that come with it – including “Suggested Posting Time”.

And last – when a URL is submitted to su.pr it is automagically syndicated to the StumbleUpon network – which has been sending us significant amounts of traffic for years. You can see here in the detailed statistics how many times the link was clicked and how many re-tweets it had. And you’ll see the arrow pointing at a number in the image below – that’s how much traffic was generated through the SU network after the link was syndicated there.

Click to Enlarge

The additional traffic su.pr sends via the StumbleUpon network is an awesome value-add and a good reason to use this service over other URL shorteners when sharing your content.

No related posts.

Some questions to ask yourself when developing your content… Is your content adding value? Is your content engaging? Are you publishing quality content? This slide deck from @leenjones attempts to help you figure that out…

No related posts.

No related posts.

If your content strategy is to “Go Viral” than you need start over. As Scott Monty says above – “viral is a result, not strategy”. If you produce engaging, quality content – then you may be able to go viral. If you set up a good syndication and distribution system by creating content outposts – then you may be able to go viral.

But don’t think by just putting a video up on YouTube, it will go viral and that’s the end of your content strategy. One lesson we teach all our clietns and members is that simply building a website does not mean people will come. That’s the first misconception we always try to reverse. A killer website is only as good as the community that is built around it. Viral content needs an engaged community. Start with web strategy basics and becoming viral will be a result

No related posts.